


From Without, and from Within

by lynndyre



Series: From Without, From Within [1]
Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alliances, Gen, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Battle of Five Armies, Radagast's magic mushroom salve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-19
Updated: 2018-06-19
Packaged: 2019-05-17 13:25:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lynndyre/pseuds/lynndyre
Summary: Legolas and Thranduil part after the battle, and both must learn to see what they have been missing.





	From Without, and from Within

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alexandria (heartfullofelves)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartfullofelves/gifts).



Thranduil stands on the hill while Tauriel grieves. The air at this height holds only traces of the stench of the fighting below, spilled blood cut with broken rock and ice. Thranduil's hand flexes, fingers still expecting the shape of his sword hilt. Some of the blood he can smell is from his own armour. 

Further off, over the ice, Mr Baggins' tears are an echo to his officer's. Thorin is no longer King Under the Mountain.

Below, Legolas zigzags down the slope, away from the remnants of the fighting. Thranduil keeps him ever in the corner of his sight, until Thorin's dwarves begin to climb and Feren moves from his guard point to stand at Thranduil's shoulder.

"Show them where to find their kin." He feels rather than sees Feren's assent, and the space beside him is empty once more. Legolas is even with the old city, but skirting it. 

Tauriel's breath is the sound of an injured animal, and Thranduil gentles his touch to match. "Come. His people are here for him." Her fingers are carded in the dwarf's hair, clutching at his surcoat with a desperation that he can well remember. The hair is coarse, dirty, and tangled, trapping Tauriel's fingers like snarled wool. Thranduil knows she will never forget the sensation. "Come."

In the end he half lifts her away, pulling her up until she moves of her own will. One of the dwarves, pigtailed and moustached, makes to speak with her, hat in hand, telling her to come to the funeral. When they figure it out. That Kili'd want that. Tauriel sobs. Thranduil gives assent for them both. Allows himself a distant, impolite pleasure in the dwarves' surprise. It is a diplomatic decision as well as a personal one. If Thorin and his heirs are dead, he does not know who of the dwarves will speak for the mountain. Perhaps Dain, he of the swift insults and unruly swine. 

The bodies of the line of Durin are readied, lifted, for the trek downhill. When Thranduil turns back to the view between the mountain's arms, Legolas has moved beyond his sight.

He loses Tauriel between the hill and the camp. She goes to follow the dwarves, to see her beloved youth safely from the field. Feren stays behind him, closer than his wont. Thranduil pauses on the field, sinks his sword absently into the heart of a bleeding goblin. It scrabbles at his boot as it dies, but Thranduil only flicks the blade free and turns his face to the sky. The great eagles are circling still, in pairs; a patrol formation in the sky. The rest have landed high on the shoulders of the mountain itself. They are another mystery in this, however grateful he is for their arrival. This battle has been chaos - too many pieces, shah mat and dice and question tiles set upon the same game board. 

They have won, for the present. But Ravenhill, Legolas -- there are patches torn through too many of Thranduil's personal defenses, and the aftermath of battle is no aid. The smell of it, even fresh, even in winter, hangs in his nostrils, in his throat, thick and copper and reek. It is too familiar, even after so long. Facing the sluggish wind, breathing so many deaths, he almost expects the smell of the swampy gravepits and the deadlands outside the Gates of Mordor. 

He shakes his head to dispel the past --the present holds horrors enough. But when he crosses the footbridge into Dale, his stride falters passing the archway. Roch lies where he fell, his great antlers notched, blood already congealed on the cold stone. Thranduil finds himself kneeling, reaching out to lay his hand on Roch's strong neck. There is no spirit, no warmth left in him, the fawn who once fit in Thranduil's arms in a confusion of tangled legs, who had licked at Thranduil's hands, chewed the leaves from his crown, carried him here so far from the forest. 

"Sire?" Feren. Thranduil stands. 

"He died cleanly. Let his meat go to the people of the lake."

Roch's body is only the first of those he must see dealt with, each to whatever fate suitable. The dwarves take care of their own, the lakemen, for the most part likewise. The orcs and foul beasts of the enemy are piled and burned, dumped into their worm-wrought tunnels for the dwarves to collapse at their leisure.

And Thranduil's elves bury their own. It is easier than it should be to speak the words of farewell to the dead. The ceremony is not, could never be by rote, but the familiarity rises up, filling his throat with the needed words while the weight of empty hroa laid out in long rows drags his spirit down.

It is evening, past the lengthening shadows when Gandalf finally asks the question, voices the constant swirl at Thranduil's heart.

"Where is Legolas?"

Thranduil adjusts the drape of his robes at the wrist, so that the inner lining will fall visible. "He wished to depart. I suggested he aim west of the Misty Mountains." It is never difficult to discern the scrutiny of the Istari. It is much rarer for Thranduil to truly mind it.

"That is not like you." The wizard's eyebrows arch in deceptively mild interrogation.

Thranduil turns to meet his gaze, head tilted a fraction of a degree from rudeness. "Nor is it like you to concern yourself with me and mine. You have achieved your end here, Mithrandir, whatever it may have been. Be content."

Be content, as Thranduil himself is not. 

It is not like him to have enabled a soldier to flee the battlefield. Even in the aftermath, the army moves together. Thranduil himself would never have sought to abandon his troops when under Oropher's command. Was that a failure as a commander, to have allowed it, or as a father, to have necessitated it?

In the night, Dale suffers a wall collapse, and the remnants of Laketown come to bunk down among Thranduil's army. It makes for an interesting night. There has been cooperation already in the aftermath, despite the language barrier, and to see them mingling around the campfires, touch and gesture and shared food and song- that is a very different memory of siege, an aspect of alliance he had nearly forgotten.

Bard's family is moved into the meeting tent, though Bard barely sleeps, and his son appears for only a few hours around dawn. Thranduil welcomes Bard's daughters himself. They are wary, but there is strength in them, and passion, behind the fear. Legolas and Tauriel protected them, it seems, from the Orcs who chased Thorin's dwarves. His son saved Bard's children.

He watches the smallest curl warmly into a robe from his own tent and cannot regret that disobedience. They had thought to have a daughter, once, he and Legolas' mother. They had planned it, in a nebulous way, for when Legolas was older. But when Legolas was older, Thranduil's wife was already gone, and so much of himself had followed her into dust and starlight.

Bard's company he truly enjoys. It is surprising, and should not be. How much of his isolation has he chosen, over the years? Some he has not, many of the Sindar he grew up with are long dead, or long sailed, but in truth of late he has driven away even Galion and Feren. 

The day allows little time for contemplation. Winter's chill is working both for and against them. For, though it does only so much, and the ravens of Erebor are returning to a charnel feast at their doorstep. Against, as the frost threatens, and the lakemen's need for safe housing waxes constant. But at night he does not sleep. For a time he watches the sky over the mountain, and then across the open land towards the Woodland Realm. Mirkwood that it is, now. 

The open sky he drinks in. It is too long since he left the trees, even for a little, and yet they need him. And he gave his promise to this kingship. He is no Amroth, to tire of his charge and abandon it, and he is no Elrond, with wrought and augmented power to enhance his own, to strengthen his lands. 

It is strange how much Legolas does not yet see- how much he was not there to remember, and how much Thranduil must, in all this time, have failed to teach him.

***

Legolas goes. 

He doesn't think, at first. Only moves. He is past the worst of the battle plain before it truly registers what he has been walking past, before the thought of Tauriel's betraying devastation will retreat enough to see the man broken under a troll's body, the elf staring at the sky with a sword through her breastplate. His stride falters at the clear ground, but he does not turn back.

The smell of the battlefield fades, the dead still fresh, and the stench still that of orcs and fell creatures and blood, not yet of rot or pyres. As Legolas moves westward the cold bite of snow and rock gives way to the strange clear smell of open treeless lands, where Smaug's devastation still holds sway. 

He turns neither north nor west, the Grey Mountains are a distant hated shadow, and he has no desire to pass close to the Woodland Halls, even knowing Thranduil remains in Dale. There are too many shades of Tauriel, of his own life, of all the things he is getting _away from_.

He crosses the Forest River where it widenes into marshland, between the wood and the Long Lake, jumping lightly between the growths of marsh grasses and the mossy stones. The decaying wood of a beech tree holds beneath his feet but gives way under the claws of the goblin who follows him, one of many craven deserters fleeing the battlefield. Legolas kills him easily, but watches the browned, dying reeds with greater care, their winter colour blending with the grey sky, the grey water, the muddied grey goblins.

Past the water, he cuts south into the trees, unwilling to remain longer in the open. He is skirting the borders of his own territories, his own patrol paths. There are no current traces of elven scouts, and he takes care to leave no sign- the patrol radius was shortened to condense the elven presence closer to the stronghold when news of Smaug first reached the birds, and would have been pulled closer still to defend the settlements while so many went to battle.

Legolas doesn't know how many elves his patrols have lost. They will have to be re-assigned, the down-time of the wounded accounted for. Some they will lose to sailing, if their spouses, or loved ones have been killed.

He should know those numbers. It rankles, guilt-laden, that he does not. Surely it is not so many.

The idealistic drive of Tauriel's surging confidence had made so much sense. Of course they should act. Of course they should fight. 

The empty forest drags darkly at Legolas' throat, and tastes like bloodied snow. The clicking of chitinous mandibles is a welcome distraction, as red eyes in bulbous clusters glitter in the gloaming. He empties more than half his quiver before the trees are empty. The arrows come away tipped in viscous ichor, and he sits above the bodies on a twisting branch to clean them one by one.

Before dusk on the second day he has outpaced all the orcs and goblins that fled Erebor during the battle. He could remain at this perimeter overnight, possibly eliminate further battlefield deserters, but he rejects the thought even as it occurs. He will not stop, nor turn aside, though he has no fixed path, only a potential name. He needs to move, to keep moving.

He holds to his anger, going south. Towards the bite, where the woodmen live, the forest is somewhat healthier, though the trees are overfelled in places, cleared for ease of farming. And they are less elven, quiet, waking only slowly and reacting with little intent. Further, the forest grows darker, and then darker still, like layers of shadow piling one upon the other. The trees south of the forest mountains are more twisted, their voices mutter dark and angry thoughts, hating the things that move in their branches, hating more the things that walk two-legged over their gnarled, snarling roots. 

The emptiness of the northern forest lingers, with his unguarded patrol routes vying for space against vivid frozen images of the battlefield, as it had been when he crossed it. He pushes them away. Tauriel's arguments were correct, he knows it, and the need to move in the world is still burning in his chest, still guiding his feet forward. But clearer than her rhetoric he recalls her glances at the dwarf, the curve of her body desolate over his corpse.

He wants to argue it; in anger, in defensiveness, to make his excuses for having disobeyed orders. He wants to shake Tauriel away from her obsession, to have her beside him again. He wants to tell his father all the ways his orders were wrong, why Legolas has not been disloyal but only right - it circles, fruitless and frustrating.

His father had not asked for an explanation. He had not even been angry- and that thought freezes Legolas in the branches of a three-yeni oak - Thranduil had not been angry with him. With Tauriel, yes, but - In the face of Tauriel's treason - drawing a weapon not just on a fellow elf, but on your king is the act of a man, an orc, a Noldor, never a silvan elf - But they had been _right_ -

No amount of internal sophistry quiets the knowledge that in some things, they were not.

And as the anger begins to burn out, Legolas remembers his father's salute, and the confusion twists inside him like an ember.

***

Dain is abrasive and insulting, as expected, but Thranduil is finding him perversely much easier to work with than was his cousin. The insults are formulaic, and aimed at his features instead of his honour. One day, if they make it through this to a true alliance, he means to ask Dain about Thorin's anger, and about that particular accusation.

In the end it is not Dain he asks the question of, but his emissary, Balin, son of Fundin, of Thorin's Company of thirteen. He will be Seneschal of the Lonely Mountain, if he has not yet been appointed such, and negotiating with him carries both echoes of the frustrating past and refreshing possibilities. These dwarves are less predictable than their ancestors.

The conversation begins on the subject of trust. Of reliability. The words are ritually cautious. "Off the record, there was a point when we thought you might withdraw."

Thranduil looks the dwarf up and down. He is all respect in posture, and in tone, and yet skilled enough as a diplomat to yield no ground in doing so.

"I might have done so. I did not. I expect Tauriel has spoken to you?"

An incline of the snowy head, curls of his long beard brushing the skirts of his tunic. She has been among the dwarven encampment, when not among the people of the lake. Her grief is a listless, driving force. Thranduil can guess at Tauriel's reading of events, but not with the certainty he would have once claimed. Each reminder of misread intent, in others and in himself, is an irritant he means to deal with. He takes a sip, reflecting, then raises a finger towards the dwarf. "While we speak off the record, you might be able to answer me a question."

Balin's eyes are patient, hooded, his hands folded into the opposite sleeves.

"Thorin Oakenshield once accused me of exactly that, of having fled the battlefield, after Smaug first came.  
He seemed to believe I had turned away from aiding the mountain as the dragon attacked, as though he had asked our help and been denied it as the very flames of Smaug's first wrath were still burning in Dale. Yet we did not reach the mountain for some several days - in the space of our march the distance between our wood and here at the mountain's foot, Erebor and Dale were both days lost, and most of your kin fled to the Iron Hills, the men of Dale to the Long Lake. I am certain at least that I did not meet Oakenshield then. I knew his face from Thror's audience hall, and have forgot none of that line."

Balin licks his lips, a delay wrought for the shaping of another diplomatic response. It is to his credit that Thranduil cannot be sure what precisely this dwarf makes of any of them.

"Thorin was marked by that day, by that loss, more than we knew for many years after. I think, perhaps, that some of his memories grew... altered... with the passage of time and with the needs of our people pressing on him. He felt the loss of place more strongly, I think, than the loss of a crown."

Thranduil remembers Thror's ending. A madman charging his ancenstral ruin, a dethroned king trying in vain to wrest an ancient home from the hands of the the Enemy's creatures. Thrain had been called mad as well, gone and fled the battlefield in the wake of Thror's death - called madness by some and cowardice by others.  
A not infrequent madness, the desire to leave a plain of carnage, to abdicate the responsibility thereof. If Thorin's madness had been different, had looked for blame to place on other shoulders than those of his forefathers, well. 

Thorin Oakenshield had stayed on that battlefield, fought with sword and broken branch to lead his people safe. Thranduil, having taken up Oropher's sword and mantle before the gates of Mordor, could find reason to respect that. If Thorin's mind had played him false in remembering Thranduil, it was done, and he was dead, and horrors have distorted the memories of many, elves not least.

Thranduil rose from his chair, crossing to the small table. He fills a second goblet, and offers it to his guest. Balin takes the cup with all grace. The atmosphere of the tent has shifted, some oppressive mood lifting and passing away.

"Now. What words would you speak to me, *on* the record, son of Fundin?"

There is something different now in the expression behind those lined eyes. Thranduil finds he does not resent it.

***

The wood feels diseased. Black squirrels, hardy and inclined to spread, are the only animals he sees, save for insects and the things that slither and crawl in the shadows. The squirrels are thin, their voices angry. He leaves them a crumbled nut-meat, but the forest is worsening.

He is making mistakes. He is tired, and frustrated, but he has always had someone at his back. At his side. Tauriel's absence is not simply the loss of her friendship, of his one-sided, imagined love, it is a hole in his defences.

The adult spiders he kills easily. The spiderlings, the young, still larger than the forest squirrels, swarm out from the trunk in hideous chaos, from too many openings to cover with a single bow. He is too close. Rat sized fangs sink in above the knuckle even as he strikes out with his dagger, twists to shake and fling it away. Small mercy the bite is to his off hand rather than his draw hand, but it impedes his grip regardless. The venom is underdeveloped, no danger to his life, but the itch of it is almost worse than pain, persistant and shifting with every movement of his hand. The flesh itself, radiating from the bite, is swollen hot and red, until his nail beds itch with the pressure of it, and when he bends stiff fingers his pulse beats visibly beneath the white-taut skin.

The bruising, the few scrapes from fighting that largest orc, the bloodied nose, they were marks of battle. This is the mark of a novice, someone to be kept on close patrols until they were deemed safe in the woods. It angers him more than any more serious wound, and itches in constant condemnation.

By a reckoning of the trees, Legolas is far south in Mirkwood, and near to the hill that was once Amon Lanc. He had expected the orc presence to rise once more, he watched for them. But though the forest is thick with their stench, their detritus, the trees marked and hewn, the only tracks are old. 

And then he finds tracks that are elven.

***

When Mirkwood's army finally begins the march home it is with a driving desire for safe-haven, for comfort and familiarity, and cold with the winter wind that blows through the empty places in his ranks. There will be empty flets among his trees by spring, as those who have lost too much decide to sail. But their flank is defended now, and they have gained allies, and the darkness stands a little further away, for whatever time it gains them. 

Thranduil's horse's gait is sure, and steady, and he misses Roch with every stride of it - though the lack of antlers allows Feren to ride closer beside him to report. He does not fall back immediately, instead keeping pace beside Thranduil. There is something else he is waiting to say, but evidently he does not yet think it time.  
Thranduil allows it to remain. They move without speaking, and the formation and movement are grounding enough. Feren's apparent overtures are odd, but not unwelcome. The nights he has spent planning with Bard have reminded him of the pull of friendship, and he finds he has no desire to remain distant.

The gate opens to his will as they reach the halls, and he finds words to speak to the elves who have assembled. Bird and messenger have brought tidings, and the full tale will be spun out into songs over a yeni of feastnights, of victory and mourning and valor and strange allies. There is joy, but elven joy has ever been a thing tempered with sorrow.

Within his own chambers his wife's gems are set aside. They run like starlit water through his fingers, and he remembers the sparkle of them in her brown hair, the shine against the soft glow of her skin. But they are cold, however precious, and finally he closes the lid. They must be remade to exist in anything but memory, and that remaking is a choice he will leave in Legolas' hands.

***

Neither cleansed nor festering, the tower of Dol Guldur stands dark and confusing against the deepening sky. Legolas has never stood so close. He had not expected to be able to get- every time they moved against the darkness in the south, they had been met with orcs and poisonous vapours and venom. Now he is on its very doorstep without challenge, and the worst of the evil he expected here is ...not.

Even without leaving the treeline, far back from the walls, he can feel the menace is absent. This is the hole of some dark creature, a diseased nest for the hatching of foul things, but the nest is empty; even of broken shells. The elves who came here, and those who came with them, drove the Necromancer out.

The marks of elven presence are disconcerting here, especially so strongly felt. Legolas has no memory of Amon Lanc, their capital here on the treeless hill before Oropher his grandfather moved them north. Legolas was born to the northern forest, to the darkening trees. This place as it is now, rank and desolate even when no longer garrisoned, darkly pointed towers decaying in their dispossession --the idea that it was ever a home to elves seems not just impossible but profane.

It is in the shadow of the empty tower that he meets a wizard - Aiwendil, the Brown.

Legolas has never made camp with a wizard before. Never indeed with any not an elf. He has spoken with Mithrandir in his father's halls, but Aiwendil, Radagast, is different. He is at once more like an elf and less like any being Legolas can classify. The Grey Pilgrim, like his name, has the feeling of an emissary of another thought, and there is something not unlike Elrond's remnant of the Noldor in his colored fires and the light of the West. Aiwendil feels more earthy, more animal. Certainly more dirty. Something in him almost of the silvan or the avari, this wizard who even in the shadow of Dol Goldur's tower is wearing a nest of birds beneath his hat. 

Aiwendil is content to make his own conversation, and Legolas listens for what intelligence he will offer on the actions of the White Council, between digressions of wood, and fauna, and all manner of creatures. In the pause of Aiwendil's words, Legolas catches himself scratching aimlessly between the fingers of his swollen hand.

The wizard has a salve for it. He digs about in his pockets, of which he has more than Legolas has ever known any single robe to contain, producing a profusion of seeds, small bones, a living flower, many feathers, and a handful of pellets that look all too much like rabbit dung. Finally there is a small pot of salve, and Legolas takes it warily, but it smells only of oils, crushed herbs, and mushrooms. It goes on cool, and sinks eagerly into his skin, into the bite itself, into his blood where the spider's fangs pierced through.

When the world begins to change about him, there is no fear. Across the little campfire, which sparks in strange, glowing pinks and blues and greens, Legolas watches Aiwendil's face alter without seeming to change. His beard melts away as illusion, and behind it is a face as ageless as an Eldar, and the bird nesting in the tangles of his brown hair has a plumage that shimmers blue and orange in the firelight.

"Ah, oh dear. It works very well on my friends, you see. I've not tried it on an elf before." 

But the salve does work. Legolas can flex his fingers again without the strain of swollen flesh, and the red is receding. It is only the forest, now, that is distorted.

Above them, around them, the branches are dancing, twining and unknotting themselves, the old, dark trees seeking each other's embrace. They are free to reach again, free to grow, and Legolas can see the shadow lifting away from them like little puffs of mushroom spores, like dark dandelion fluff, rising and blowing away to the south. He opens his mouth to ask the wizard why, but when he inhales the question disappears, and he can taste orchid and yarrow and sage, and he is breathing in the vapour above his father's bathing pool.

For a moment, he is his father, feeling the water pour through the furrows of his cheek, hearing the weeping in the corridor, in the rooms below. The ventilation shafts of the caves carry the sound, heavy and draining. Legolas tastes orchid water and salt, blinks and he is running among the thickest trees, all four legs swift across the uneven forest floor. He is the white stag, guarding the forest, rubbing his antlers against the gnarled treetrunks. He is himself, reaching out towards the hand of a Man, tall and stern .

He sleeps through the night in Aiwendil's camp, deep and undisturbed among the birds and small animals that gather, under the wizard's fretful and apologetic watch. And he dreams of a road, a single road, unfurling beneath his feet, leading at once home and out across the whole of the world.

Legolas mounts the slopes of the Misty Mountains in the hours before dawn, and meets no danger despite the covering darkness. The foothills are empty, the goblins even now a burnt and festering pile on the battlefield. He nears the high pass as the sun rises, and he looks back towards the wide expanse of the forest, the twisting shadow of the river, the far silhouette of the Lonely Mountain beyond.

The light is gold on the dark leaves, and Mirkwood is both shadowed and beautiful. 

He turns, and follows the path west of the mountains.

***

Sixty years pass from that first journey. A short span, in the life of an elf, but moments are the shaping of all thinking beings. This time Legolas is returning in trumph and victory, bearing the friendship of all the free peoples of the world. He has seen the wider world, and carries the dust of many lands on his boots. He has a new bow; a new strength, a new surety. The Ring is destroyed.

Mirkwood is now the Wood of Green Leaves.

The forest is burned and scarred, for Sauron's allies left their mark in the north as effectively as in the southern lands. As Gondor, as Rohan, and Lothlorien, and Dale and Erebor, so too was the Woodland Realm assailed by the servants of the enemy. The trees are blackened, charred in places, cut and hewn down- but they are growing still, and they are green. Greener than Legolas has ever known them, with a verdance that is more than a colour, it is an essence, a truth, a flourishing forest sprouting from the twisting, darkened roots of his youth. 

His father's face is like the forest. It is scarred, openly now, burned full through, and half blind. His crown is wrought of new growth around blackened branches, and the freshest, greenest leaves twine living through his hair, and kiss the scars of his cheek. And he is smiling. Without artifice. And behind the clouded white of Thranduil's left eye, and the clear gaze of his right, there is an echo Legolas has not seen since he was a child, the echo of his mother, wed forever, no matter how far away.

Legolas kneels, full willing, and Thranduil reaches out his hands; strong fingers ringed in metal and never in magic pulling Legolas to stand on equal footing.

"Father."

"Son. Welcome home."


End file.
